Black Sunday

Black Sunday is a 1975 novel by American writer Thomas Harris. The novel is a thriller about a plot by terrorists to commit mass murder during the Super Bowl in New Orleans, and law enforcement efforts to stop them. Harris wrote the novel after watching the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis, where members of the Black September Organization took Israeli athletes hostage and murdered them. It was the first novel by Harris, and achieved only moderate success until it was sold to Hollywood. The 1977 film adaptation was a moderate critical and financial success, and sparked interest in the novel. Black Sunday is one of the two books by Harris not to involve the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. In his introduction to a new printing of the novel in 2007, Harris states that the driven, focused character of terrorist Dahlia Iyad was an inspiration for and precursor to Clarice Starling in his later Lecter novels. Plot Michael Lander is a pilot who flies the Aldrich Blimp over NFL football games to film them for network television. He is also, secretly, deranged by years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a bitter court martial on his return and a failed marriage. He longs to commit suicide and to take with him as many as possible of the cheerful, carefree American civilians he sees from his blimp each weekend.